Chapter 12 #2
"Small." Nicole looked out the window. "Bridge, she's just a woman who was rude to me at parties and closed a file eight times.
That's the whole of it. She's not a villain, she's not a rival, she's not — " She stopped.
"I've spent five months carrying her around like she was the size of a building. "
"And?"
"And she's the size of a person." Nicole let out a breath she'd been holding since December. "It's not a better woman. It was never a better woman. It's just that talking to her was easy, and easy is very hard to compete with, and I lost fourteen years to it."
Bridget started the car.
"Right," she said. "Where am I taking you?"
"Home."
"Which one?"
Nicole opened her mouth and found she didn't have an answer, and Bridget — who had known her since they were eleven and had never once let a thing go — did not push it, and drove to Charlestown without saying anything else.
Gordon found out four days later, and not from her.
He came down to the fourth floor to do it, which was new. He had not set foot on four since December. He stood at the end of her row with his hands in his pockets like a man who had been told where the line was and had decided to stand exactly on it.
"Have you got two minutes?"
They went to the stairwell, because it was the only unwatched place in that building and both of them knew it.
"Ilene told me you went to see Whitney."
"Ilene is a menace."
"Ilene is the best employee this company has ever had and I have never once spoken to her," Gordon said. "That's a separate thing I'm dealing with."
Nicole waited.
"I want to say something and I've been practicing it in the car," he said, "so let me get it out in one go, because if you interrupt me I'll do it badly."
"All right."
"I found out on Tuesday. And the first thing I felt — the very first thing, before anything decent — was that I should have been in that room.
" He was looking at the wall over her shoulder.
"Not to protect you. I know better than that now, I've had four months of knowing better than that.
It was worse than protecting. It was that I wanted to see it.
I wanted to be in the room where my wife finally said it, so I could — " he stopped.
"So I could have been there. So it would have had me in it. "
Nicole didn't say anything.
"And I sat in my car in the garage for about half an hour with that," Gordon said, "and I've come down here to tell you about it rather than to get over it privately and take the credit for being fine. That's the whole speech. That's it."
She looked at him.
Something had changed in him and she could not place it for a second, and then she could: he had stopped waiting for her to respond. He said the thing and then he was simply standing there, not braced, not watching her face for the verdict. Whatever he was doing, he had stopped doing it at her.
"Thank you," Nicole said.
"You don't have to—"
"Gordon. I'm saying thank you. Take it."
He nodded and looked at the floor.
"Was it — " He stopped. "No. That's a question I don't get to ask."
"It was awful," she said. "And it was small. Both. You can have that much."
He went back up. She stood in the stairwell for a minute afterward with her hand on the cold rail, and noticed that her heart was going, and was extremely annoyed about it.
Whitney Larkin resigned her executive role on the nineteenth of June.
Nicole heard it the way she heard everything, which was from the fourth floor, twenty minutes after it happened. There was no announcement for two days and then there was a short one, and the word used was departure, and Trevor Nagle wrote it.
The building did not stop. That was the thing that struck her most. A woman ran that company for fifteen years and on the twentieth of June the elevators still worked and the coffee was still terrible and Kara's team sent a deck to a client with their own names on it, and by lunchtime nobody was talking about it.
Nicole did not see her go.
She thought about that for a long time afterward — that there had been no last scene, no doorway, no box of photographs in the lobby. Whitney Larkin simply stopped being in the building, the way weather stops.
She kept her equity. Everybody noted that and nobody said it out loud: a partner who resigns an executive role and keeps a fifteen-year stake has not left, she has stepped back, and in eighteen months when the noise has died she will be at the table again in a different chair.
That is how it is done in that city. Nicole had watched it done to other people for twenty years.
Ross said, "That's not the end of it, you understand."
"I know."
"She'll be on the board by spring."
"I know, Ross."
"And you're all right with that?"
Nicole thought about it, in a corridor, with a drawing under her arm.
"It's not mine to be all right with," she said. "That's a company decision. I don't have a title."
Ross looked at her for a second longer than was comfortable.
"You know that's not going to hold much longer," he said.
And four days later Nicole realized she had gone a whole week without thinking about Whitney at all, which was, in the end, exactly how far in the distance a person can get.